"Why can't I be alone? It seems like I always need someone."
All reports are based on true events and are published with the client's consent. All personal details have been changed so that it is no longer possible to draw conclusions about them.
Tim, 28 years old, came to me with a question that was bothering him: Why did he feel so incomplete without a relationship? I could hear the sorrow in his voice as he told me about his recent break-up. Sophie, his girlfriend, had left him, and although he somehow knew that their relationship had no long-term potential, he was still devastated by her sudden absence.
During our conversation, it became clear that Tim was struggling to be alone. He constantly longed for a relationship to avoid the feeling of loneliness. It was as if he could only define his own identity through the presence of others.
"Ever since I can remember, I've always been in a relationship. When one ended, I was immediately looking for the next one," he told me. His need to constantly be in a relationship seemed to have a deeper cause. He described how he lost himself in each relationship, always adapting to the needs and desires of his partners. This latest breakup was more than just another goodbye; it was as if he had lost a part of his identity.
Our sessions with Tim crystallized numerous insights into his deep-rooted problem of relationship addiction. It became apparent that Tim's constant need for a relationship had less to do with genuine affection for his partners and more to do with an attempt to fill an inner sense of emptiness. He confessed in one of our conversations: "I only feel complete when I'm in a relationship. Without someone by my side, I feel like a lost piece of the puzzle." This revelation was a turning point as it illuminated the core issue of his situation. Tim had never learned to be alone; he didn't know his true worth independent of a relationship. He described how each breakup separated him not only from a partner, but from a part of himself. "It's like every time I break up, I don't just lose the person, I lose a piece of myself," he explained.
When asked how he could know this feeling from his past, as what clients experience in the here and now is often something that they have already experienced in a similar way in their lives and it shows up again and again today, Tim thought for a long time and at some point said: "From my mother. When I was little, she often went shopping on her own and then left me home alone for the time being." When asked how old he was at the time, he replied: "I don't know exactly, 4-5 years."
I understood. Such early bonding experiences can have a significant impact on later adult life. For a child at this age, being left alone by a primary caregiver, such as the mother, can lead to intense feelings of abandonment and insecurity. Young children are not yet able to fully regulate themselves emotionally. They need reliable coregulation from caregivers at the beginning of their lives in order to be able to regulate themselves reliably later in adulthood. These early experiences often unconsciously shape the child's understanding of closeness, security and attachment. In Tim's case, this early experience of being left alone seems to have contributed to a deep fear of loneliness and abandonment, which is reflected in his constant need for a relationship in adulthood. His addiction to relationships could therefore be an unconscious strategy to avoid the recurring feeling of abandonment he experienced as a child. By constantly staying in relationships, he unconsciously tries to compensate for the experience of abandonment and to preserve the feeling of security and belonging that he missed in his childhood. Only to be abandoned again in the end and thus complete the original experience, including all the feelings and discomfort from back then.
When I asked Tim if he thought this experience had done something to him, our conversation took a deeper turn. He paused, thought about it and then said, "Now that I think about it, I realize it's the same feeling as today." Tears welled up in his eyes. "I never thought it could have anything to do with today. It was over 20 years ago."
This moment in counseling is typical, as clients often can no longer see the connection between their past experiences and their current problems. The original experience is so far removed from their own experiential space that it seems like a distant, irrelevant event. The problem with this is that, in a sense, time does not exist in the psyche. Everything happens simultaneously in the unconscious. We as people may grow older, but our unconscious is constantly comparing our current experience with earlier, biographical experiences.
If, as in Tim's case, our brain comes to the conclusion that "I'm alone", it looks for a comparison and finds one in earlier biographical experiences, such as his mother going shopping. At this moment, Tim feels like he is four or five years old again. This realization is a turning point for many clients, as they begin to understand how deeply rooted and influential their early life experiences are. They realize that their current emotional reactions and behavioral patterns are often repetitions or echoes of these early experiences. For Tim, this moment was a crucial step on the path to healing and understanding the roots of his need for constant relationship and the associated fear of being alone.
From this profound insight, we drew important conclusions for Tim's further counseling process. Initially, the focus was on helping Tim to come to terms with his early experiences of being alone and to process the associated feelings. We worked on raising his awareness that his current relationship patterns were actually a reaction to these repressed childhood experiences. This process involved emotional work to help Tim recognize and accept the sadness, fear and insecurity he had felt as a child.
Alongside this, we began self-reflection and self-acceptance exercises to build Tim's self-esteem independent of external relationships. He learned to see himself as a complete person, even when he was alone. The insights from the first session and the counseling approach that built on them eventually enabled Tim to overcome his deep-seated fear of being alone. He began to see times of aloneness not as threatening, but as an opportunity for personal growth and self-discovery. This change in his understanding and approach to being alone was a crucial step in his development towards a healthier, more self-determined lifestyle and emotional independence.
A month after our sessions ended, I received a message from Tim saying that he was doing well and had no interest at all in a relationship with a woman at the moment. He emphasized that this was not because he was no longer interested in relationships, but rather because he had so much going on for himself. Inspired by our sessions and his new insights, Tim had started to enrich his life with new personal goals. He told us that after our last session he had bought a piano and started taking singing lessons. His goal was now to be on a small stage with his own songs within a year. Until then, he was fully occupied with himself and his plans, and perhaps the right woman would be sitting in the audience when he performed for the first time. And if not, that wouldn't be a problem. He had learned that a girlfriend was not a "must-have" in his life, but rather an "add-on", an enrichment, but not the source of his happiness or self-esteem. Tim managed to find a lasting solution to his biggest life issue to date in just four sessions.
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